ABSTRACT
The mainstream view among scholars of the history of international law and international relations is that morality did not matter in the early modern international world. In the seventeenth century, these scholars argue, the traditional substantive criteria of ‘just war’ (the existence of just material cause and just intentions) were replaced by normative thinkers, such as the Spanish neo-scholastic Francisco Suárez or the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, with purely formal criteria. These formal criteria required only that war was waged by sovereign authority. Thus, according to this view, war became an ‘instrument of statecraft’ which the sovereigns could use at their will for settling disputes and achieving their political aims.1
